Apple commits to buying chips made in the USA; TSMC commits to America
TSMC will build a second fab in Arizona to produce 3nm chips by 2026
TSMC originally planned on spending $12 billion on its Arizona plant which was expected to turn out 5nm chips by 2024. Now, TSMC will add a second factory and will spend $40 billion on the pair. The second facility will be ready by 2026. The fabs will turn out 600,000 wafers each year which will be enough to meet American demand according to the National Economic Council.
The 600,000 wafers made in the U.S. will be a small percentage of what TSMC turns out in Taiwan where production in 2020 came to 12 million wafers. Joining TSMC is Intel. The American chipmaker has already said that it will surpass TSMC and Samsung in process leadership by 2025 and is planning on building new fabs in Arizona and Ohio in an attempt to win business from Apple. Both TSMC and Intel’s plants will be partially subsidized by the U.S. government under the CHIPS act.
The U.S. will be self-sufficient with the production of 600,000 wafers coming from TSMC’s Arizona fabs
Ronnie Chatterji, National Economic Council acting deputy director for industrial policy, said today, “It’s the foundation of our personal electronics, and also the future of quantum computing and AI. At scale, these two [factories] could meet the entire U.S. demand for U.S. chips when they’re completed. That’s the definition of supply chain resilience. We won’t have to rely on anyone else to make the chips we need.”
The first fab, which again goes online in 2024, will now produce chips using a 4nm process node instead of 5nm as originally expected. The lower the process node, the smaller the transistors used on a chip which means that more can fit into a small space. And that is important since the higher the transistor count of a chip, the more powerful and energy-efficient it is.
